“To be subversive, is to wish to overthrow, destroy or undermine the principles of established orders. As such subversive cartographies offer alternative representations to established social and political norms. Maps are no longer cast as mirrors of reality, instead they are increasingly conceived as diverse ways of thinking, perceiving and representing space and place which express values, world-views and emotions. Maps are no longer part of an elite discourse: they can empower, mystify, and enchant. More critical assessments of mapping increasingly explore subversive contexts strongly associated with innovative methodological approaches, with mapping seen as an explicitly situated form of knowledge. This shift has been strongly facilitated by the increasing popularity of new media, burgeoning technological change and newly developing mapping spaces (eg OpenStreetMap, WorldMapper and EmotionMap). So subversive mapping has an agency, which can be enacted outside existing cartographic conventions. It has escaped from the grasp of cartographers: everybody is mapping nowadays.” (edited from the original call for papers)

••••

Subversive Cartographies 1: Papers emphasizing the role of the aesthetic in the construction of alternative and artistic mappings. Common themes are the relations between artistic practice and mapping, narrative and (e)motional cartographies, and the politics of design.

Discussant: Vincent J. Del Casino, California State University Long Beach

••••

Subversive Cartographies 2: Papers focus on the role of technologies and methodologies important in community engagement. Common themes include changing roles of the web, the emancipatory potential of GIS and ways of evaluating the aesthetic.

Subverting Civilization: Re-Mapping World History
Mellina Patterson and Stephen Hanna, University of Mary Washington

Small Voices Magnified: Using Web 2.0 for Mapping Alternative Australian Viewpoints
William Cartwright, RMIT University

“There is no community in Eastside”: GPS Tracks, Walking Interviews and Stories of Place
Phil Jones, University of Birmingham and James Evans, University of Manchester

Re-focusing on the Visual Politics and Practices of Grassroots GIS: Considering Subversive Potential and Limits
Sarah Elwood, University of Washington

••••

Subversive Cartographies 3: This final session focuses on more abstract aspects of subversion. Common themes include the ambiguities of the subversive, different ways of theorizing the medium and the practical, political and affectual potential of oppositional mapping.

Abstract: My paper will review the research framework and methodology that I have developed for my dissertation on the systematic analysis of “intentionally manipulative maps (IMMs).” Though all maps are inherently political; some maps are more political than others. I differentiate an IMM from other maps by defining it as any map that is intentionally created to represent a one-sided perspective using data that is on its own quite ambiguous in supporting the illustrated perspective. I will review the significance of systematically explaining and understanding the techniques used in producing IMMs. I will also highlight the utility of using visual methodologies to help us better explain why, and predict which, cartographic techniques are used to successfully manipulate the presentation of spatial data. Finally, I will discuss how the results of my ongoing research may be used by a variety of map producers and users – from state policymakers to PPGIS groups.

Abstract: Radical cartography is a practice that uses maps and mapping to promote social change, and is part of a cultural movement that cuts across boundaries of art, geography, and activism. This paper will present examples of cartographic work by artists, architects, and collectives who create maps to raise awareness of social justice issues. These maps are both artworks and part of a larger activist research and practice. Maps, as inherently political documents, are an ideal form to visualize the social ramifications of spatial practices. Artists play with cartographic conventions including geographic shapes, wayfinding symbols, and aerial views in order to delve into issues from garbage to globalization, migration to extraordinary rendition. Projects discussed include Ashley Hunt’s intricate diagram of the social effects of the global prison-industrial complex; the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s mapping of stakeholders who make and manage the “garbage machine” in New York City; Pedro Lasch’s maps which bear physical traces of being carried across the US/Mexico border; and Trevor Paglen’s route map of CIA rendition flights. While mapping in art practice has expanded into technological and performative realms, the focus here is on a traditional aspect of the map as a work-on-paper. This underscores artists’ use of the “lo-tech,” paper map as an accessible, aesthetic, and informational form that can be used for public address.

Abstract: Samuel de Champlain’s exploration and travel routes through what would become New France have been extensively documented and mapped by geographers and historians today. These contemporary maps focus on the locations of Champlain’s routes and camps and dates of arrivals and departures, set in the context of coastline and hydrographic base maps. As conventional cartographic depictions of the routes of a European explorer and colonizer, these maps are silent with regard to the Anishnabek storied geographies through which Champlain moved and upon which he relied for the success of his own explorations and mappings. In our map, we resituate Champlain in that Indigenous landscape by focusing on narrative, including Anishnabek storied place names and the stories from Champlain’s journals. In so doing, we subvert and re-imagine the traditional form of historical cartography for the representation of place rather than space, combining Champlain’s own cartographic language, described and demonstrated by him in several treatises, with Indigenous cartographic language, through contemporary digital map techniques. Keywords: place, historical geography, narrative, Indigenous cartography, Canada.

Lynch Debord
Denis Wood, Independent Scholar

Abstract: Psychogeography emerged entirely independently in Paris in the 1950s and in the Boston area in the 1950s and 1960s in the wildly disparate practices of the Situationists and planners and geographers. While the former was a subversive practice tout court, the latter aspired to little more than playing a role in established planning practice. Yet both were equally committed to the development of an objective description of the relationship between the urban environment and the psychic life of individuals, both depended heavily on walking as a method, and both produced maps that have become iconic

••••

Subversive cartographies 2

Subverting Civilization: Re-Mapping World History
Mellina Patterson and Stephen Hanna, University of Mary Washington

Abstract: While critical cartography has challenged traditional approaches to maps as mirroring reality or communicating external (and eternal) Truths, this message has not permeated attempts to map history for popular or classroom use. Instead world history atlases and maps use conventional techniques to represent traditional historical narratives. Conventional world history reifies place-based identities through invoking civilizations and cultural regions as obvious and static. Conventional mappings of history reinforce this message by presenting history as a completed project rather than as an ongoing product of interpretation. Thus, both time and space are presented as static and the world is doubly imagined as known, knowable, and sufficiently recorded. This confident completion of the historical globe then provides support for assumptions about peoples around the world as essential, eternal and different. Such mappings ignore contemporary trends in the study of world history. World historians now routinely challenge earlier Eurocentric research and, like critical cartographers, emphasize the need for diverse perspectives, challenge products that protect elite positions, and recognize the need to analyze and present information gathered at multiple scales. Yet, even interactive mapping websites intended to help students imagine the geography of world history offer limited perspectives and do not invite students to critique the maps they both consume and produce. Remapping world history could subvert comfortable and confident popular narratives that draw on conventional historical narratives. This paper examines why mapping history has not gone “critical” even as historical research has, and presents preliminary ideas about what a critical world history cartography would entail.

Small Voices Magnified: Using Web 2.0 for Mapping Alternative Australian Viewpoints
William Cartwright, RMIT University

Abstract: “Getting the message across” demands access to communication media. When small, independent groups wish to be heard their inability to mobilise conventional media can disallow any message being broadcast. Using the Web as a publishing medium has allowed these relatively small voices to disseminate their viewpoint, which might otherwise be impossible if only conventional media could be utilised. For publishing ‘small voice’ information that includes geographical information, Web 2.0 provides a conduit whereby ‘individual’ maps can readily be produced and made available, globally. The need to have skills and tools for paper or ‘conventional’ Web mapping production disappears. The message broadcaster becomes the cartographer. This paper explores the use of subversive cartographies in Australia. It begins by providing a historical overview about how maps have been used, historically, to illustrate aspects of dissent, focusing on Australian movements for nationhood, Republic Australia and environmental and social issues. Then it focusses on the use of maps produced and published via Web 2.0 to promote alternative viewpoints in contemporary Australia. Finally, it considers whether these maps do provide the Australian community with useful information that complements ‘mainstream’ Australian media resources.

Abstract: Mapping is used in this proposed mixed-method, qualitative study of Canadian children with physical disabilities involving mobility impairments. The project aims to describe the accessibility of neighbourhoods for physically disabled school-aged children and how they navigate, experience and evaluate these environments. Case studies will be conducted with 16 children from urban, suburban, rural and remote Northern regions. Mapping exercises are among the qualitative methods employed as they are engaging, non-threatening, and reduce the adult-child power differential. Large, colourful, laminated maps depicting children’s neighbourhood will be custom made for each child. The maps will be at a child-friendly scale and will include parks, community centres, schools and main streets. Together, the child and the Research Assistant will mark child-relevant places on the map with stickers and trace boundaries indicating his/her daily routes and local geographies. Using a semi-structured, open-ended script, the child will be prompted to think and communicate about these built environments and to identify the advantages and disadvantages of using a mobility device. All children will be asked to mark and describe the accessibility of their physicians and dentist’s offices, a park/playground, a restaurant, a cinema, a library, a place of worship, community centre and a shopping area. Following the session, when possible, the RA will calculate a “neighbourhood walkability” score using Walk Score, Google Maps 2007 (http://www.walkscore.com/). Mapping techniques because they enable populations who face accessibility barriers arising from impairments to illustrate geographies of everyday life.

“There is no community in Eastside”: GPS Tracks, Walking Interviews and Stories of Place
Phil Jones, University of Birmingham and James Evans, University of Manchester

Abstract: We’re told there is no community in Eastside, Birmingham. This means it’s okay to largely destroy the area and remake it in the name of regeneration. Except that, inconveniently, there are a small number of people who live there and a very much larger numb er of people who work there. When is a spade not a spade? Hmm. So a community exists, and its members have embodied understandings of this area. How do we capture these before the spaces are gone forever? Mike Crang (2001, 194) has described the diagrams produced by time geographers as producing ‘cadaverous geography’, recording traces rather than the actual living body moving through timespace. GPS tracking is open to the same critique – the fantastic diagrams produced by the Amsterdam Realtime experiment (Propen, 2006), for example, are essentially silent about the actions of the bodies that produced them. How to connect the trace and the person? The Rescue Geography (www.rescuegeography.org.uk) project is conducting a series of walked interviews with members of Eastside’s community and recording the track of these walks using GPS. The idea is to explore the potential of this as a new highly ‘public’ methodology, but also to cartographically capture the stories told and the locations they’re told in. A positivist, surveillance technology becomes a tool for validating the voices and knowledges of a community discounted by the agents of regeneration. When the military launched the satellites, they never saw that one coming.

Re-focusing on the Visual Politics and Practices of Grassroots GIS: Considering Subversive Potential and Limits
Sarah Elwood, University of Washington

Abstract: Grassroots GIS initiatives – participatory GIS, community mapping, and public participation GIS – are too often assailed from some corners as ‘just thematic mapping’ and from others as not sufficiently radical or alternative in the politics they advance. I argue that these perspectives are rooted in an under-examination of the visual politics advanced through maps and mapping in grassroots GIS, overlooking a complex layering of subversions wrought through these artifacts and practices. Conceiving of subversion as an undermining of dominant rules or conventions, I draw on evidence from ongoing participatory GIS research with neighborhood revitalization organizations to illustrate how they advance multiple subversions. These disruptions target cartographic conventions and ‘expertise’, understandings of what constitutes a geographic information system, representations and interpretations of spatial data, as well as dominant hierarchies of spatial information access and sharing. However, this subversive potential is typically constrained or limited in other ways, so I also explore the genesis of these limits in institutional relations, accepted forms of political speech, and validated forms of ‘expertise’. I suggest that grassroots mapping efforts are often navigating around institutional or political ambiguities that lead them to produce visual politics that are simultaneously subversive and retrenching. That is, their visualization practices often disrupt norms about expertise or hierarchies of spatial information access, while also reinforcing these norms or hierarchies. This analysis of limits is particularly important to understanding how we might maximize the potential of countermapping to foster political

••••

Subversive cartographies 3

Are Maps Autistic?
J.B. Krygier, Ohio Wesleyan University

Abstract: To subvert is to, literally, “under-turn.” “Subversive cartography” typically implies the use of maps to disturb, overthrow, or undermine an oppressive or restrictive social, political, or economic order. We expect much from maps in thishuman, social realm yet they can struggle in this role. Maps are alluring and evocative, yet they are distant, anti-social, detached, even alien. So close, yet so far. Are maps autistic? Autism is a spectrum of neurological conditions, distinguished by varying degrees of impaired social interaction, rigidity, repetitiveness, and emotional detachment with, paradoxically, the potential for unusual creativity, talents, and high intelligence. Debates rage over the origins, nature, cognitive foundation, and social construction of autism (as they do with maps). There are curious parallels (and differences) between autism and maps which, when explored, may help gage the characteristics and potential of maps as subversive objects. Maps may interpellate disparate human subjects: what kinds of “map people” do maps make us? Do such tendencies operate in the map creation process, or the map reading process, or both? Might maps “autistic” tendencies, if they exist, subvert subversive intent or enhance it?

Abstract: The internet can be considered one of the most efficient mediums for the communication, interchange and dissemination of information, especially of visual resources like images and maps. However, while this accelerated information flow fits perfectly into the time-space compression of globalization, the purposeful or accidental sending of incorrect, distorted or invented facts is a negative side-effect that is rarely taken into account in academic research. A good example of how virtual cartographies can turn into “accepted truth” is the case of an internet map of the Brazilian Amazon region that showed Amazonia as an International Reserve under the tutelage of the United States and the United Nations. The map circulated first on the internet in 2000 and since then has re-emerged in at least four follow-up waves, while the internet community uncritically accepted the map as a taken-for-granted representation from an American sixth-grade textbook in geography. A closer scrutiny of this case, however, debunks the map as a fictitious cybercartography invented by a nationalistic group in Brazil. The aim of this study is to discuss the trajectory of this map hoax in time and space and analyze the secondary information flows that triggered off protests and reactions in the academic communities and the general public in Brazil and the United States. The main argument of this paper is that discussions on critical cartography and counter-mapping should pay more attention to the dangers and consequences of “subversive” maps that undermine the socially-critical perspective.

Abstract: Re-mapping the University is a multi-year initiative of the Counter Cartographies Collective, 3Cs, to subvert common notions of the nature of the University, such as the ‘ivory tower’ or spatial/rhetorical imperatives of research campuses for the “21st Century University.” Employing Gilles Deleuze’s logic of “and, and, and…” 3Cs mapping does not define or accept what University ‘is’ so much as utilize mapping as a means to project and literally engage other ways of ‘doing’ the University. Such a variety of mappings produces the university as a site of multiple struggles and potential resistance by permanent and transient inhabitants. In this endeavor, 3Cs uses a variety of techniques ranging from traditional cartographic methods, ethnography and, most significantly, the particular version of the drift utilized by practitioners such as the Situationists and Precarias a la Deriva. Theses drifters attempt to use this approach to understand and re-plot their own territories (Paris and Madrid respectively). In a similar way, 3Cs drifts through the territories, spaces of capital and discursive formations of knowledge production. Utilizing these approaches, 3Cs plots UNC-Chapel Hill, Research Triangle Park and the spaces, practices and precarity of the knowledge economy and contemporary University life. In practice, these drifts can be realized in different ways, such as a snapshot of UNC when it cancelled Labor Day, a “disOrientation” Guide to UNC-Chapel Hill and recent work on the significance of and basis for research campuses.

The Emotional Life of Maps and Other Visual Geographies
Jim Craine, California State University, Northridge and Stuart Aitken, San Diego State University

Abstract: Our work is about affective geovisualizations. It embraces the intensification of emotional life that is possible through spatial representations, from movies to maps and back again. Our primary assumption is that while information visualized through today’s maps and GIS can be provocative, it is often joyless and over-calculated, with a tendency for the technology to overwhelm the content. Even the best GIS-visualized data are often more interesting to think about than to experience, more interesting to create than to embrace. We move forward with the argument that movies are a much more potent producer of emotional geographies than static or animated cartographies. We engage the recent literature on nonrepresentational theory, and particularly the work of Levy and Deleuze, to pose the question: if cinema is more concerned with engaging emotions than celebrating technology, then why should this not also be the case for research on geovisualization? In broaching this question, we elaborate the emotional content of moving spatial images and make a case for a fuller embracing of nonrepresentational theory by the geovisualization community.

[…] John Krygier has given a couple of talks that ask if or how maps are autistic. Here’s part of his abstract for a conference paper he gave in Boston: Are maps autistic? Autism is a spectrum of neurological […]

[…] This next little black map represents the pumpkins that can be found here. It represent all the pumpkin lanterns that can be found in a Boylan Heights neighborhood. The overall idea is attempt to convey creative, place-inspired maps, including maps of night, crime, fences, graffiti, textures, autumn leaves, routes, the underground, lines overhead, stars, and jack-o-lanterns. As it is being called subversive cartography. […]